Saturday, March 26, 2016

Donald Trump--crude, crass, but correct

Milo Yiannopoulous makes an excellent case for why Donald Trump's over-the-top rhetoric might actually be necessary and even therapeutic for American politics--and perhaps even American culture as well.Yiannopoulos definitely has a point that political discourse in this country has largely devolved into an endless cycle of claims of grievance. Legislation is passed, and entitlements granted, not on the basis of national interest, but simply to appease a particular demographic over their hurt feelings regarding a real or imagined slight of some kind. Even issues upon which common sense suggests there should be broad consensus--e.g., national security, the state of the armed forces, the efforts of police to enforce the laws--have been consumed in the language of grievance: when it matters less whether or not the United States military can defeat all comers and more that it is sufficiently "inclusive" to various putatively maligned groups, an important dialog on how to defend this nation has come seriously off the rails.Donald Trump's language is hyperbolic, boorish, crass, vulgar, and rude. What it is not is hateful, racist, sexist, and xenophobic. What it is not is dangerous--unless one traffics in the politics of grievance. To the establishment aristocrats and the political left, who are heavily invested in such politics, Donald Trump is most emphatically an existential threat.Donald Trump is demonstrating almost daily that the establishment emperor truly has no clothes. By stripping away the artifices of politically correct language, he has revealed an appalling truth about the political establishment--they really DON'T know what they're doing. They AREN'T responding to ISIS, they AREN'T confronting the harsh economic realities of unemployment and stagnant wages...and they aren't because they don't know how.The most glaring proof of their total incompetence? This late in the election cycle and they STILL haven't found a response to Donald Trump that works.